April 2019 – In Review Part I

Batman Who Laughs #4 was or is a great cover, huge print run. Easy to get. Can still find this one online and likely at your local retailers.

Detective Comics #1001 – 66,743

We saw Arkham Knight make the first appearance in the regular ongoing DC title with a brief appearance in the giant #1000 issue.

Everyone was likely expecting the same character behind the mask but we all got a surprise when it was revealed to be an entirely new character named Astrid Arkham (which occurred in Detective Comics #1003).

This 12,596 was the total print run for the Lotay Variant, almost as big as both Cover A and C combined which had a print run of 16,308.

Reaching a peak of around $15 early on and it seems sets of all 3 covers were selling well, this is now a $5 or so book. I think once this was released, we found out how easy they were to obtain.

Obviously I won’t be posting a picture of this one as it was pretty raunchy if you ask me.

Immortal Hulk #2 4th Printing – 5,698

Immortal Hulk dominates the weekly headlines it seems. If it’s not a new printing of a new monthly issue it’s a reprint.

Seems like these new additional printings are gonna keep on coming. Immortal Hulk #2 4th Printing is not the end either. There was a 5th printing with another 1:25 virgin ratio printing as well. Can still find these online as Midtown still has them available.

I beginning to think Marvel is taking this series a bit too far. It’s a great read but they’re really going overboard I think.

Marvel Tales Thanos #1 Bartel Virgin Cover – 11,840

Marvel Tales Thanos #1 Bartel Virgin Variant is that impossible variant. With the hefty $7.99 price tags these carry, most shops weren’t going to order a book to qualify and sit on so many books with almost a trade paperback price tag.

This one is still a solid $100 book on the secondary market. Unless you found for cheap though, not a lot of wiggle room for profit if you grabbed to flip.

That’s Part I for April 2019. Hopefully we’ll have Part II up soon to conclude this month in review.

You’re missing it here also. Comichron doesn’t break down the sales from Diamond to stores by Variant or later printing, they’re all lumped together. Immortal Hulk 16’s 90,000 number is the 1st printing, the ratio, the 2nd printing and that ratio all mashed together into one number. If you assume 16 had a slight increase over 15 on the 1st Printings orders, the Second Printing should count for around 15 to 30,000 copies especially since the price gouging on the First Printing Ratio variant didn’t begin until after FOC on the First Printing. As you can see here clearly, Comichron is using the shipping date of the First Printing of Naomi #3 with their listing for what you said was the Final Printings numbers. That means the numbers could possibly include late sales of First Printings to stores also which happens due to returned inventory and overstock held back for replacing damages.

244 Naomi 3 $3.99 03/20/19 DC 5,111

In other cases if a book hasn’t even sold out at Diamond you’d have to check the numbers from multiple months and keep adding them together to guess at what the actual print runs were. If later printings are mixed in there’s no way to really know and break it down.

Usually Comichron does break them off for additional printings. Perhaps since #16 were so close together they lumped those together. Still though, most additional printings were small so a 90k print run is still massive if it’s including the 2nd printings..

If you see some on there labelled as Second or Third Printing let me know. I’ve yet to find that breakdown on the Monthly lists other than on the Yearly one which will have variants separated out. Immortal Hulk #16 in this case mathematically couldn’t have more than a combined 3,500 copies in existence for the two ratio’s combined and realistically it’s probably a good bit less than that since many stores First Printings orders probably weren’t in 25 increments. In our own case we got 50 Second Printings, 25 First Printings and sold all 3 ratio’s prior to arrival actually making money on the First Printing one up front and steadily making money on the Second as they sell slowly now that the sales of the 2 Second Print ratios covered the cost of having them. There’s no justification for deaming these failures when the qualifications for being a success are so low. It’s easy to call any Marvel Ratio that sells for ratio or above a complete success and in this case even if they drop down to ratio for all covers in the short term, that’s still a win. The math’s pretty simple. If you get 50 to $60 in a Presale for the Ratio there’s no cost to having ordered them. It’s covered. ANY sales of the standard cover Second Printing is all profit at that point whether you sell just one a month or all 25. If you don’t sell the ratio at the early inflated price you still only have to sell about half the 25 reprints to break even or in this case, just one a month for a year. Then any price you get for the ratio is profit even if it sits until the end of year half price blowout. If the leftovers end up in the dollar bin, great, the kids and late comers get a deal as well and the amount in the black goes up even more. If in cases like this it makes me by 25 all at once because they dangled a carrot and that saves me from buying 8 for each of the next 3 Printings that’s an even bigger win. take friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man #6. It was such a great and inspirational story I would have bought 25 to 50 copies to make sure I had a copy in stock for years to come without and ratio offering. The fact that they did was just icing on the cake and in this case icing I tried to give to St Jude’s Children’s Hospital. Even if it bottoms out and sells for $10 I’d still call that a win.

That’s the thing, comichron doesn’t usually label them as 2nd, 3rd, or beyond printings. It gets a bit confusing but most issues will only have an additional printing per month but IH was an exception I think.

And yes, they do use the original sale date from the first printing. We’ll never know the exact print run number of any book sadly. We can only guess based on sales units. But we can all assume in April IH #2 first print was sold out. So that listing for issue #2 at print run 5,698 was probably a majority of the 4th print that was released on April 10th. We’ll likely see another Immortal Hulk #2 in May’s comichron monthly sales since the 5th printing hit shelves on May 29th.

And if they did lump #16 second prints in with the first prints, we can only assume by the average numbers of the additional printings being around 3-5k units, that still likely pushed the first print for #16 to the mid to upper 80k print range, which is still a huge increase from the range the previous printings were averaging.

I would suggest that there is another reason for IH16 to have a higher print run beyond those listed. It’s the first issue of Vol 4.

We have a number of customers who, when they realize a book is smoking hot and they may not want to fork over the cash for expensive back issues, will choose to purchase trades for the first X number of issues and then start collecting single issues from that point on.

In this particular case, we added 8 additional subs for Immortal Hulk beginning with issue 16. And most of those were customers who realized a couple issues ago that that would be their best jumping on point.

We always order heavier on “first issue after a TPB” for popular titles, because there are quite a few collectors out there who are happy to buy trades up through issue X and then start single issues with X+1.

Possibly contributed some to the print run but I can’t buy that IH obtained that many more readers.

I still think it’s safe to assume the huge increase is based on the first ratio variant in the series after issue #1. Hot series with a 1:25 ratio variant usually equals quick sale and easy money. Seems some got greedy, trying to set the price too high (yeah, I’m talking about you Midtown since you now had to lower the price) and they’re still now trying to dump them and these were too easy to obtain. Then the second print came too soon with it’s own 1:25 variant of the same cover.. Marvel really screwed the pooch with these types of shenanigans.